Virtual art gallery maker: hang a show online free

Your work lives in a scrolling grid on a portfolio page. A visitor thumbs past nine pieces without stopping on any of them, judges the set by whichever file loaded worst, and leaves. A Gallery project in i3Dify hangs the same files as framed pieces on a lit wall, and the viewer moves along that wall one work at a time.

A lit wall slows the viewer down

A grid asks for a decision about the whole set. A wall asks for a decision about the piece in front of you. The gallery scrolls horizontally: the wheel or a swipe glides the camera along the wall, arrow keys step between works, Home and End jump to the first and last piece, and the dock carries zoom and fullscreen.

The staging is yours. Frames turn off entirely or take a colour, the wall takes a flat colour or your own texture with the repeat scaled to taste, and each piece carries a spotlight whose opacity you set against the ambient light. Titles sit under the frames when you want them. Every one of those switches is in the Gallery settings. Set the wall dark and the spotlights hard, and fifteen images read as an exhibition rather than an upload.

Consistent capture is what separates a show from a folder

Mixed lighting across the set reads as amateur faster than anything else on the page. Shoot or scan everything under one setup, export at 1920px or more on the longest side in sRGB, then upload JPG, PNG or WebP. A PDF works too, and each page becomes an artwork. Aspect ratios are detected on upload, so a tall etching and a wide panorama hang side by side without either one getting cropped.

The free plan is 3 projects and 50 MB of storage, with a single image capped at 10 MB. That is one real exhibition, maybe two. Free galleries also carry the small i3Dify pill in the corner, and removing it is 3 dollars a month on Pro.

A hotspot turns a hanging piece into a price

Any artwork accepts a hotspot: a marker you drop on the piece that the visitor taps to open a link, or to read the note behind it. Put the medium, the dimensions, the year and the price in that note, then point the link at your store, your print shop or a mailto for enquiries. i3Dify does not process payments, so the sale closes where it already closes and nobody takes a cut of it.

Keep sold work on the wall and mark it sold. The red dot convention exists because visible sales move the pieces that are left. Taking a sold piece down hides your best signal.

Six to twenty pieces is a show, fifty is an archive

Pick a constraint before you pick the work: a series, a medium, a period, a colour, a question. Then include only what serves it. Below six there is nothing to walk. Above twenty, visitors stop looking and start scanning, which is the failure mode you left the grid to escape.

Sequence for rhythm rather than chronology. Put your strongest piece third or fourth, because a visitor needs one or two works to calibrate before they can register that something is exceptional. Write three or four sentences of statement and hang them as the first frame, so people know what they walked into.

A scrolled wall cannot carry scale or surface

• Scale: a room-sized canvas or a sculpture you circle does not survive the trip. Photograph those in situ with a person in frame and say plainly that the gallery is a reference to the work.
• Surface: impasto, gold leaf and letterpress lose most of what makes them good the moment they become a flat texture on a screen.
• Search: text inside a 3D scene is not indexable. If you want the exhibition to rank, write an ordinary page about it and embed the gallery in that page.

A wall with a spotlight on each piece and an enquiry link behind each hotspot is a show that stays open, changes when you decide, and travels as one URL. Announce it with a date and email the people who already buy from you, because a gallery that quietly appears gets no visitors.

Build your virtual art gallery.